Great French Tales of Fantasy/Contes fantastiques célèbres: A Dual-Language Book

Great

French Tales

of Fantasy

Contes

fantastiques

célèbres

A Dual-Language Book

Edited and Translated by

STANLEY APPELBAUM

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

Mineola, New York

Copyright

Selection, English translations, Introduction, and footnotes copyright © 2006 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2006, contains the full French text of six stories originally published between 1822 and 1890(see the Introduction for specific data), together with new translations. Stanley Appelbaum conceived of the volume, made the selection, did the translations, and wrote the Introduction and footnotes.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Great French Tales of fantasy=Contes fantastiques célèbres: a dual language book / edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum.

p. cm.

Title: Contes fantastiques célèbres.

English and French.

Contains the full French text of six stories originally published between 1822 and 1890.

eISBN 13: 978-0-486-12171-0

1. Short stories, French—Translations into English. 2. Short stories, French. 3. French fiction—19th century Translations into English. 4.3. French fiction—19th century. I. Title: Contes fantastiques célèbres. II. Appelbaum, Stanley.

PQ1278.G78 2005

843'.087660807—dc22

2005054930

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

44713802

www.doverpublications.com

CONTENTS

Introduction

Charles Nodier (1780–1844)

Trilby; ou, le lutin d’Argail / Trilby; or,

The Elf of Argyll [1822]

Théophile Gautier (1811–1872)

La morte amoureuse / The Amorous Dead Woman [1836]

Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870)

La Vénus d’Ille / The Venus of Ille [1837]

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889)

L’intersigne / Second Sight [1867]

Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893)

Un cas de divorce / A Divorce Case [1886]

Qui sait? / Who Knows? [1890]

Appendice: Préfaces de Trilby / Appendix:

The Prefaces to Trilby

Introduction

The nineteenth century is generally considered as the golden age of the French short story (conte, nouvelle, récit, . . .), which had made fitful, though significant, progress since the medieval period, passing through such phases as the Boccaccio-inspired narratives of the sixteenth century and the philosophical parables of the eighteenth. During its great century, a place of honor was held by the conte fantastique, five of whose preeminent exponents¹ are represented in this volume by highly regarded examples of the genre.

The inspiration for French fantasy tales of the Romantic period often came from the Arabian Nights (known in France since the early eighteenth century); from more recent native works, such as Cazotte’s Le diable amoureux; and, beginning in 1829, from the translated works of the German master E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822).² The Romantic-era stories included here are those by Nodier (some of whose best work precedes the Hoffmann craze), Gautier, and Mérimée (the latter two continued to write fantasy even later).

After something of a gap in mid-century, during which the predominant Realist mode largely precluded fantasy, the genre resumes, sometimes with even greater narrative finesse and more intense psychological insights, in the work of the Symbolists, Decadents, and even some Naturalists. In this period Poe, whose stories had been brilliantly rendered by Baudelaire between 1852 and 1865, became a major model for authors. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Maupassant are the spokesmen here for the latter part of the century. (The stories are arranged chronologically by date of first publication, not by date of author’s birth.)

As is well known, the conte fantastique, glorified by the Surrealists and deftly handled by other twentieth-century French writers, has continued to be a significant and clearly recognized genre amid the gratifying diversity of French literature.

Charles Nodier

Nodier has been called ahead of his time, the most wonderful creator in the French Romantic era, and the true founder of French fantasy literature. Trilby is one of his major works, repeatedly singled out for discussion even in general literary reference books.

Life. Jean-Charles-Emmanuel Nodier, born in 1780 in Besançon (in the Jura mountains of eastern France, near Switzerland), was the illegitimate son of an eminent Jacobin criminal judge and a servant woman. Precocious, he delivered a public address at age eleven. During the Reign of Terror, he was horrified, and emotionally scarred for life, by the executions he witnessed in Besançon. After local schooling (he became an expert in entomology, and an assistant librarian at the school, and he was already attracted to secret societies), he lived in Paris off and on beginning in 1800. His first novel appeared in 1802. The following year, he was jailed for 36 days for having composed an ode attacking Napoleon. In 1808, he became a teacher in the Jura, and married, remaining chiefly in the provinces until 1813, when he was named as a government secretary and librarian in Laibach (now Ljubljana) in what was then the Napoleonic puppet state Illyria (basically Dalmatia, but including other parts of latter-day Yugoslavia); in Illyria he became fascinated by the local folklore, which was imbued with some of the most extreme beliefs to be found in Europe, such as that in vampirism.³

After nine months at Laibach, Nodier returned to Paris, where he practiced journalism. In 1814, he welcomed the Bourbon Restoration under Louis XVIII. His long but intermittent career as a writer of fantasy (he wasn’t always able to devote his full time to fiction) began in 1818. An extremely pleasurable trip to Scotland in 1821—followed later that year by the publication of Promenade de Dieppe aux montagnes d’Écosse (Excursion from Dieppe to the Mountains of Scotland; this travel account included reminiscences of a strikingly pretty ferrywoman)—was the inspiration for his 1822 story Trilby (see discussion below). In 1824, a turning point in his life, he became director of the prestigious Parisian library, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, which became his home, as well; there he presided for years over one of the most important literary salons, captaining the early Romantic movement and nurturing many young talents, including the dazzling genius Victor Hugo, who broke away in 1828 to conduct a circle of his own. The marriage in 1830 of Nodier’s sole surviving daughter left him with severe neurasthenia.

Nodier continued to write contes fantastiques, the chief of which (also set in Scotland) is the lengthy 1832 La Fée aux Miettes (The Crumb Fairy); but he also wrote numerous learned philological and other nonfictional works, such as a critique of dictionaries of French. Beginning in 1820 he participated in the ongoing series of Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (Picturesque and Romantic Travels in Old France), which made the Parisian public conscious of many neglected cultural treasures in the provinces that were crying out for conservation. In 1833 Nodier was elected a member of the Académie Française (when he died in 1844, his replacement was Mérimée). His last conte fantastique appeared posthumously.

Trilby. This story was first published by Ladvocat, Paris, in 1822 as a separate small volume, with the title Trilby,/ou/le Lutin d’Argail./ Nouvelle Écossoise (Trilby; or, The Elf of Argyll. A Scottish Tale) and the motto Amour et charité (Love and Charity), which occurs in the story, representing a major theme. (See the Appendix to this volume for Nodier’s two informative prefaces to the story.) Trilby can be taken at face value as a supernatural haunting, or it can be read, without unduly straining the interpretation, as a psychoanalytical study of repressed libido, with the mind’s censor refashioning the loved one in dreams into the semblance of a nonhuman figure familiar to the dreamer from everyday folklore, and with the monk Ronald embodying the dreamer’s own guilt complex. (Smarra is largely concerned with dreams and nightmares, and Nodier wrote an essay on that subject in 1831. Gnosticism and the occult also influenced his work.)

The dreamlike subject matter of Trilby is more suitable than that of other stories by Nodier to his discursive, amiable style (already somewhat old-fashioned at the time), characterized by long and intricate complex sentences. But this doesn’t signify monotony: his prose is consciously musical; his descriptions of nature are incisive as well as charming; and several of Trilby’s love speeches are glowingly ardent, the soul of Romanticism in any acceptation of the term. The story borrows a number of elements from earlier Gothic novels, such as the fanatical monk, the graveyard, the mysterious paintings, and the hidden family relationships; but, in turn, it adds a rather extensive ethnography of Scotland.

The Scottish Proper Names. Most of the place names in the English translation of the story (chiefly localities between Glasgow and Loch Lomond) have here been verified in the tenth edition of The Times Atlas of the World (Plate 55 and Index) or on internet maps, and are spelled in this translation as they are there. The following terms, not found in these sources, have been borrowed here from the 1895 translation, Trilby the Fairy of Argyle, by Minna Caroline Smith, published by Lamson, Wolffe and Company, Boston: the place name Innisfail, and the kelpie name Shoupelties.

Théophile Gautier

Gautier’s vast oeuvre was by no means restricted to fantasy, but he cultivated the genre for 34 years, longer than any other nineteenth-century French writer, and at least one literary historian has proclaimed his contes fantastiques to be his best work. La morte amoureuse is usually listed among his finest fantasy stories.

Life. Pierre-Jules-Théophile Gautier was born in Tarbes (in southwestern France) in 1811. His father, a tax collector, was transferred with his family to Paris in 1814, and in the capital Théophile attended the finest secondary schools, meeting Nerval among others. Some early poems appeared in 1825. In 1829, while he was thinking of becoming a painter (pictorial effects were to feature prominently in his writing), he met Victor Hugo and fell under his spell. At the boisterous premiere of Hugo’s arch-Romantic play Hernani in 1830, Gautier, in a dandified bright-red waistcoat, was conspicuous among the playwright’s supporters; in the same year, he published a book of verse. His debut as a prose writer, in 1831, was with a conte fantastique (his last fantasy story, the major work Spirite, was written in 1865).

From 1830 to 1833, Gautier belonged to the Petit Cénacle, a fellowship of art-for-art’s-sake creative men of which Nerval was also a member; in 1834, he moved near to Nerval’s residence in the austere artists’ colony on the Impasse du Doyenné which they helped to make famous.

Gautier’s celebrated transvestite novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, whose preface was a ringing manifesto for his view of art, appeared in 1835 and 1836. La morte amoureuse was first published in 1836. In the same year, Gautier visited Belgium; he was to travel extensively all his life (in practically every country of western Europe, Algeria, Greece, and the Levant), his most famous trip being his first one to Spain, in 1840, from which he brought back his most popular and influential travel account, Tra los montes (Beyond the Mountains; aka Voyage en Espagne), published in volume form in 1843.

Meanwhile, he had immersed himself in journalism, becoming a leading drama critic by 1837. Another phase of his activity, which would last for years, was supplying librettos (scenarios) for ballets; the first two of these, and the most famous, were the imperishable perennial Giselle, in 1841, and La Péri, in 1843, both starring the matchless Italian ballerina Carlotta Grisi, for whom Gautier nourished a lifelong impossible love that was reflected in his writing. In 1844 he entered into a liaison (lasting over two decades, with lapses) with Carlotta’s sister Ernesta, a singer.⁴ Their two daughters were Judith Gautier (1845–1917, a writer specializing in Far Eastern themes, and a champion of Wagner) and Estelle Gautier (1847–1914), who was at one time engaged to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.

In 1845, Gautier met Baudelaire, who was later to dedicate Les fleurs du mal to him, calling him an impeccable poet. By the time that Gautier published his own major collection of poetry, Émaux et camées, in 1852 (he made additions and revisions until 1872), he had left behind him what he now felt to be the youthful extravagances of Romanticism, and (as the volume title suggests) he was concerned with quieter lyric poems of varied but always flawless technique, each of which was meant to be a work of art as delicate, durable, and cool as an enamel or a cameo. Émaux et camées delighted Baudelaire, and was a crucial influence on the chilly Parnassianists, who were shortly to dominate the French poetic scene. At the same time, the ex-revolutionary Gautier was associating himself unmistakably with the more conservative elements of the Second Empire; in 1855 he abandoned other journalistic activities to work for the official government newspaper.

In 1858–1859, he published a six-volume history of recent French drama. Between 1861 and 1863, his popular swashbuckling historical novel Le capitaine Fracasse appeared in installments (he had been promising it to publishers for decades). In 1868, he became personal librarian to Princess Mathilde Bonaparte (1820–1904; daughter of Jérôme, the quondam king of Westphalia, and cousin of Louis-Napoléon), who maintained an important literary salon. Gautier died of a heart ailment in 1872. He had written plays, narrative poems, and art criticism in addition to the works already mentioned. He had made four unsuccessful attempts to be elected to the Académie Française. He was one of the most representative nineteenth-century French authors, though he probably hadn’t achieved true greatness.

In his fantasy writing, Gautier was strongly influenced by E. T. A. Hoffmann between 1831 and 1841, after which that influence waned. Another German inspirer was Achim von Arnim (1781–1831), whose stories and novels feature truly supernatural phenomena that can’t be explained rationally. Gautier was also fascinated by various types of occultism, including Mesmer’s magnetism; his stories often deal with animated art objects, the use of drugs, and the intervention of the devil.

La morte amoureuse. This story was first published in the periodical La Chronique de Paris (Paris Chronicle) on June 23 and 26, 1836. In 1839, Gautier included it in the volume Une larme du diable (A Tear Shed by the Devil), published by Desessart (Paris); and, in 1845, in the volume Nouvelles (Stories), published by Charpentier (Paris).

The priest’s double life, and certain details, are indebted to Hoffmann’s 1815–1816 Gothic novel Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs). The name of Father Serapion is an hommage to Hoffmann’s four-volume story collection Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brotherhood; 1818–1821), which also contains references to vampirism. (As mentioned in the section on Nodier, above, the vampire was already known to French audiences; the word had entered French, from the Serbian, in 1746.)⁵

But La morte amoureuse is also full of Gautier’s own constant preoccupations: an obsession with sex and death; multiple personalities, schizophrenia, and the phenomenon of observing oneself from the outside; the maleficent, hypnotic power of women’s glowing eyes (also present in Mérimée’s stories La Vénus d’Ille, Colomba, and Carmen); resurrection through the power of love (a folktale motif also alluded to in Giselle); and the world of dreams as a second existence.

As always, Gautier’s prose is lucid and elegant, with many painterly effects, and the heartfelt story moves along unflaggingly.

Prosper Mérimée

Everyone agrees that the short story was the most appropriate form of expression for Mérimée. Only a few of his stories contain supernatural elements,⁶ but La Vénus d’Ille is so outstanding that it belongs in any fantasy anthology. In a letter of 1857, Mérimée called it his own masterpiece; later critics have called it one of the most successful fantasy stories ever written.

Life. Mérimée was born in Paris in 1803, the son of a minor painter and art teacher. One of his mother’s grandmothers was the fairy-tale writer Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780), author of La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast). After Mérimée’s secondary schooling ended in 1819, he studied law, taking his degree in 1823. In 1822, he began a lengthy friendship with the 21-years-older Stendhal, and wrote a play. In 1824, he published a few articles on Spanish theater.

In 1825, under the name of a fictitious Spanish actress (the first of his many mystifications), Mérimée brought out the handful of plays that constitute Le théâtre de Clara Gazul, the first published Romantic plays, inspired by Stendhal. (The enlarged 1830 edition included the highly influential 1829 play Le carrosse du Saint-Sacrement [The Carriage of the Holy Sacrament], about the eighteenth-century actress and adventuress La Périchole.) In 1827, he fooled even experts when, in La guzla (a Slavic string instrument), he passed off his own compositions as translations of Illyrian folk ballads (on Illyria, see the section on Nodier, above); some were translated into their own languages, in that belief, by Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and Mary Shelley (whom Mérimée once wooed after she was widowed). There is a trace of vampirism in La guzla. It has been said that this work introduced the prose poem into French literature, preceding Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit (published posthumously in 1842).

In 1829, Mérimée’s only novel appeared, the fairly true-to-history Chronique du règne de Charles IX (Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX), centering on the Saint Bartholomew’s massacre of the Huguenots in 1572. In the same year, 1829, he published Mateo Falcone, a story of stupendous force and concision.⁷

In 1830, on his first trip to Spain, a country he found enormously congenial, Mérimée met the Montijo family, who were to play a large part in his life. The Bourbon monarchy came to an end in that year, and in 1831 he was rewarded for the liberal views he had espoused during the Restoration with important positions in several ministries (cabinet departments). In 1834, at a very young age for the post, he was appointed as the second nationwide inspector-general of historical monuments (the position had only been created in 1830), responsible for the registry and conservation of old buildings and other cultural treasures. Mérimée took the job very seriously, retaining it until 1860 (right through the major political upheavals beginning in 1848; he gave up making personal tours of inspection after 1852). In 1834, he toured the south; in 1835, the west; in 1837, Auvergne; in 1839, Corsica (each of these four tours was followed by a published report one year later, respectively; in Corsica, he was able to verify his vision of the land in Mateo Falcone. As inspector-general, Mérimée was responsible for preserving an astonishing number of the most renowned ancient and medieval buildings in France, including the basilica at Vézelay and the Palace of the Popes in Avignon; he also fostered the career of the notorious architect/restorer Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), though he didn’t personally approve of his protégé’s marked propensity for restoring edifices like new, falsifying them permanently with his own fanciful inventions. Even aside from his numerous tours of inspection, and his even earlier trips to Spain and England, Mérimée traveled widely throughout his life: to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Germany, and Scotland.

The miscellaneous 1833 volume Mosaïque brought together the stories Mérimée had written between 1829 and 1832. He wrote eight further stories between 1833 and 1846, including La Vénus d’Ille (1837; see discussion below), Colomba (1840; another story set in Corsica, but now inspired directly by the 1839 tour; a number of critics regard it as his best work, while others denigrate it), and the world-famous Carmen (1845; he added an unnecessary concluding section on the Gypsy language in 1847). In 1844 Mérimée was elected to the Académie Française, replacing Nodier.

After Mérimée’s young friend Eugenia de Montijo married Louis-Napoléon in 1853, becoming Empress Eugénie, the emperor named Mérimée a senator, and thenceforth the author played the associated roles of a conservative aristocrat and (as Hugo put it) court jester to the empress. Between 1846 and 1866, he wrote no fiction, turning instead to the truth: factual studies of aspects of Spanish, Russian, and ancient Roman history. (His last three short stories, 1866–1870, are all mentioned in footnote 6, above.) He also taught himself some Russian (he became a personal friend of Turgenev), and turned out some passable translations of Pushkin and Gogol. In general, he had a jaundiced view of authorial life, and didn’t consider writing (especially fiction writing) as his basic occupation.

A sufferer from severe asthma later in life, Mérimée was a pioneer wintertime habitué of Cannes, where he died in 1870.

Mérimée had a strong sex drive, had many mistresses, and maintained some very lengthy liaisons (the very shortest, possibly lasting only one night and ending with a bedroom fiasco, was with George Sand in 1833; soon thereafter she found consolation with Alfred de Musset). But his mistresses tended to disappoint him, or even desert him, sooner or later, and his many marriage proposals never came to fruition. All his life, he knew how to bridle his emotions and disguise his feelings in society.

La Vénus d’Ille. The story was first published in La Revue des Deux Mondes (The Review of Both Worlds), Paris, on May 15, 1837. In 1841, it appeared in a volume along with Colomba and one other story. The narrator of La Vénus d’Ille is a learned inspector of monuments, a linguist, and an amateur draftsman, like Mérimée himself (who had visited Perpignan, Ille, Sarabonne, and Boulternère on his tour of the Midi in 1834), but older and crustier; a number of characters and family names in the story are based on actual people he had met. Moreover, he, too, was constantly wounded by Venus in real life, and he was always fascinated by lawless violence.

Overabundant sources for the plot have been suggested by scholars, more than Mérimée could have known or used. There really was a cult of Venus in the Pyrenees in Roman times, which aroused local patriotic curiosity in Mérimée’s day; and at least three partial statues of Venus in southern French collections are said to have been seen by him. He himself later stated that he had been influenced by a medieval legend found in a vaguely named source; by the satirical work Philopseudes (The Habitual Liar) by Lucian of Samosata (in Syria; ca. 125–ca. 192), in which a statue beats up people (the epigraph to the story is quoted from that work)⁸ and (for the motif of the ring) by one of the many writers called Pontanus. But the plot motifs are so universally widespread that, as mentioned, a plethora of possible sources have been named; some critics claim that they all go back ultimately to the writings of William of Malmesbury (ca. 1093–1143).

Some of Mérimée’s indispensable contributions were: to furnish a perfect story line, superbly paced; to narrate the story in the first person (a frequent procedure in fantasy stories, establishing authenticity) and in his best poker-faced, taut, unsentimental manner, interlarding it with ironic black humor and lively dialogue, which is sometimes quite folksy; to supply a wealth of realistic traits, making the supernatural element stand out, and allowing some leeway for a rational explanation (he himself was irreligious, but rather superstitious: God doesn’t exist, but the devil may); and to include some Poe- and Conan Doyle-like clue hunting and deductions.

Stendhal, much more of an impassioned Romantic than his younger friend, found La Vénus d’Ille somewhat schematic and dry, and was bored by the archeological and linguistic discussions, but wrongly so: they are not intrinsically boring to interested readers; they establish the professional qualifications of the narrator and the thoroughgoing wrongheadedness of the local amateur; and they furnish a number of striking examples of irony: the Venus is turbulent; she is the lover to be dreaded (cave amantem); and so on.

It has been pointed out that the Eutyches (favored by fortune) in the fictional sculptor’s name is a Greek equivalent of the French name Prosper, and that the Myron begins with an M, like Mérimée.

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam9

Though he was caviar to the general in his own lifetime, Villiers’s reputation steadily increased in the twentieth century. He was acclaimed by the Surrealists as a kindred spirit, André Breton praising his black humor, and he is now hailed as the father of Symbolism. One specialist in the study of French fantasy literature has called the story L’intersigne one of the masterpieces of the genre.

Life. Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, was born at Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, in 1838. He was undoubtedly of old noble ancestry, though he may not have been descended, as he firmly believed, from supreme military leaders of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The family fortunes, which may not have been great at the time, were swept away in the 1789 Revolution, and Villiers’s feckless father, a marquis, was unable to save his son from virtual destitution. Having attended schools in Brittany from 1847 to 1851, Villiers arrived in Paris in 1855. There, for nearly thirty years, he lived in proud poverty, working at journalism and odd jobs, and a fixture in the best literary coffeehouses and salons, where he charmed his friends with histrionically delivered narratives and sallies of acerbic wit. Closest to him, perhaps, of the many authorial giants he consorted with was Mallarmé, whom he first met in 1864. Villiers’s family encouraged his desire to write, and one well-to-do aunt financed his vanity publications until her death in 1871.

He published his first poems in 1858; his first novel, in 1862; his first play, in 1865. Retreats to the abbey of Solesmes (famous for its plainchant tradition) in 1862 and 1863 left him permanently religious, though not an active practitioner. From October 1867 to March 1868, he directed the journal Revue des Lettres et des Arts. Its 25 issues contained work by a galaxy of now-famous writers, and L’intersigne originally appeared within its pages. In 1869 and 1870, along with Judith Gautier and her writer husband Catulle Mendès, Villiers, who was very musical, made a pilgrimage to Wagner’s home on Lake Lucerne; Wagner didn’t take to him, and in the latter year the French visitors had trouble getting home, because the Franco-Prussian War had broken out.

Villiers first enjoyed public success, and some relief from indigence, with the 1883 appearance of Contes cruels.¹⁰ (Calmann Levy, of Paris, finally published the stories after six years of stalling; at first he had regarded them as articles and essays rather than narratives.) The volume assembled 28 items, most of which, like L’intersigne, had been written between 1867 and 1877. Among the literati, Mallarmé stated that the book was written in a truly godlike language throughout, and it was lauded by such men as Maurice Maeterlinck and Jules Laforgue. Joris-Karl Huysmans, in his famous Decadent novel À rebours (Against the Grain), published in 1884 (a year after Contes cruels), based his protagonist Des Esseintes on Villiers; Des Esseintes specifically enjoys reading the Contes cruels! (Villiers was to publish a volume of Nouveaux contes cruels, and a volume of Histoires insolites [Strange Stories], both in 1888.)

Among his most highly regarded later works are the philosophical closet drama Axël (completed 1885; published posthumously in 1890) and the science-fiction novel L’Ève future, in which the Eve of the future is a female android. Beginning in 1881, Villiers went into politics, but was never elected or nominated to any legislative or diplomatic post; he once even announced his candidacy for the vacant throne of Greece. A perennial bachelor, he never succeeded in his ingenuous attempts to marry into money (including an engagement to Estelle Gautier in 1867); in 1879 he made his housekeeper his mistress, marrying her and legitimizing their son while dying of cancer in 1889.

L’intersigne. Intersigne is said to be a term from Villiers’s native Brittany for an interpersonal vision announcing to one party the imminent death of the other. The story was first published in Villiers’s own Parisian weekly, the Revue des Lettres et des Arts, in the issues of December 29, 1867, and January 5 and 12, 1868, as the second of two histoires moroses—which were the first two stories he ever published. (On the 1883 volume Contes cruels, in which it was later included, see above.) An original first chapter of L’intersigne, later wisely omitted, was a polemic against scientific positivism.

As it now stands, the story is both spare and atmospheric, though it also abounds with spiritualistic, Roman Catholic, and philosophical observations. The language is occasionally difficult, featuring some extremely recherché words.¹¹ Villiers’s italicization of certain key words and phrases, alerting the reader to their overtones, was intentional, and is followed in this English translation. The influence of Poe is apparent, especially when the narrator’s first vision makes the presbytery resemble the house of Usher; but Villiers successfully integrates all influences into his strong Breton local color. Literary investigators have denied a real-life resemblance between Villiers’s uncle, the dedicatee of the story, and Father Maucombe, whose name (meaning something like evil ravine) is also thought to reflect the tomblike nature of his residence. On the other hand, the narrator strikingly resembles the author in numerous ways.

Guy de Maupassant

Among Maupassant’s six novels, assorted novellas, and (more or less) three hundred short stories, only a small portion are contes fantastiques strictly speaking (though there is an element of uncanniness even elsewhere), yet they stand out amid his oeuvre, especially one of his great masterpieces, the story Le Horla (1886, revised 1887),¹² and he has been called a leading exponent of the genre. His fantasy stories, like Le Horla and the two included here, are not so much supernatural fiction as extreme studies in obsession and madness, subjects of supreme personal interest to him. His mother suffered from depression, his younger brother Hervé (1856–1889) was insane for the last two years of his life, and the writer himself underwent slow mental disintegration due either to heredity or to years of dissipation (very specifically, he had contracted syphilis by 1877), though he was notoriously brawny and athletic, a fine physical specimen.¹³

Life. The aristocrat Henri-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant was born in 1850 in Normandy, either in the city of Fécamp or in the Château de Miromesnil. His parents separated in 1860, after which he and his brother were raised by their intellectual mother. Between 1863 and 1869, Guy attended schools in Yvetot and Rouen (the story Qui sait? is partially set in the latter city); then he studied law. Flaubert, another Norman and a friend of Guy’s mother, took a sincere interest in the young man and guided him in his early literary pursuits. Maupassant served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the inspiration for a number of later stories, violently anti-German. In 1872, he entered the civil service, working in the naval and education ministries until 1878.

In 1874, through Flaubert, Maupassant met Zola, who was to lead him into Naturalism and was to be important in his career. Maupassant published his first story, using a pseudonym, in 1875—as it happened, a macabre story, La main écorchée (The Flayed Hand). He was actually the possessor of a flayed hand, which he had received as a gift from Swinburne after saving the English poet from drowning at Étretat in 1866. Maupassant’s breakthrough as a writer came in 1880 with Boule de Suif (Butterball), which was part of the multiauthor collection (named after a small town near Paris where Zola had a home) Les soirées de Médan (The Evening Entertainments at Médan). Oddly enough, the bulk of his output, testifying to prodigious energy and drive, was produced during the next ten years.

His numerous collections of stories (most of which had been published earlier in periodicals) include: La maison Tellier (The Tellier Bordello; 1881), Mademoiselle Fifi (1882), Miss Harriet (1884), Toine (1886), Le Horla (1887), and L’inutile beauté (Useless Beauty; 1890). His novels include: Une vie (A Life; 1883), Bel-Ami (1885), Pierre et Jean (1888; often considered his finest), and Fort comme la mort (As Strong as Death;¹⁴ 1889).

His works were extremely popular as soon as they appeared, and have remained so. In view of their large number and great diversity, it is hard to reduce them to a few common denominators, but it can be justly said that they almost all reflect a pervasive pessimism and disdain for the world. The realistic and naturalistic stories are filled with sadism, morbidity, perversion, and cruelty. The fantasy stories, often narrated in the first person, reflect a mind accessible to the mysteries of life and anxiously searching itself for signs of madness. Generally avoiding standard supernatural paraphernalia, they feature the erosion of the mind and crises of identity. They were influenced by Hoffmann, Poe, Turgenev, and Villiers, and they parallel such contemporary cultural phenomena as the cruel novels of Octave Mirbeau and the paintings of Redon and Moreau.

After years of hard work, travel, womanizing (he never married, but had three illegitimate sons), and otherwise punishing his body with le plaisir (his eyes gave him trouble from the 1880s on), he became severely depressed, and partially paralyzed, by 1890. In the following year, he was unable to continue writing. In 1892, he attempted suicide and entered an asylum, where he died mad in 1893.

Maupassant’s prose style was supple, correct, and extremely lucid. The construction of his short stories was emulated worldwide, even in its occasional unfortunate tendency to dazzle the reader with flashy surprise endings (à la O. Henry).

Un cas de divorce. This story was first published in the Parisian magazine Gil Blas on August 31, 1886, only two months after the drowning of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who is prominently mentioned in it. It was the earliest-written of the stories included in the later collection L’inutile beauté, published by Victor Havard, Paris, in April of 1890. (This volume of stories was the last to appear in Maupassant’s lifetime.) Un cas de divorce, the next-to-last item in the volume, was added to it at a late stage, in place of another story which Maupassant had promised, but never wrote. The orchid fancier in the story reflects the author’s own obsessiveness, and his penchant for ultrasophisticated refinement.

Qui sait? This story was first published in the April 6, 1890, issue of L’Écho de Paris, and was included later that month in L’inutile beauté, as the final item in that volume. More intricate, eventful, and baffling than Un cas de divorce, which is basically a straightforward clinical study of dementia, Qui sait? features, like other Maupassant stories, normally inanimate objects that prey on their owners, plunging them into the unreal.

1. The other great nineteenth-century names are Balzac and Nerval, who appear in other Dover dual-language volumes (which do not, however, include tales that are strictly fantastic or supernatural).

2. Le diable amoureux was a 1772 fantastic tale by Jacques Cazotte (1729–1792). Hoffmann’s work is featured in two Dover dual-language volumes.

3. In 1820, Nodier was co-adaptor for the stage of the short novel The Vampyre, by Lord Byron’s physician John William Polidori, which Polidori had completed from Byron’s sketchy beginnings in 1816, when Byron and the Shelleys, at their villa across the lake from Geneva, had amused themselves with inventing horror stories (Mary Shelley’s contribution ultimately became Frankenstein). Vampirism also occurs in Nodier’s 1821 story Smarra; ou, les démons de la nuit (Smarra; or, The Demons of the Night).

4. Donizetti composed starring roles for their cousins Giuditta and Giulia Grisi.

5. Earlier nineteenth-century vampires don’t observe as many taboos (e.g., avoiding daylight) as later ones. The total Dracula complex of vampire lore was largely a creation of Stoker and others.

6. Lokis (written 1868, published 1869) is about a (literal) son of a bear who crushes his newly wed bride; Djoûmane (written 1870, published posthumously; Mérimée’s last story) involves magicians and a lengthy dream that